Miscalculation
by greensight
Summary: Set during the Insurgent movie. Caleb's thoughts when Tris fails the Amity sim.
A/N: So as much as I love the books, I really liked how they adapted the different faction sims in the Insurgent movie, with Tris fake-dying. I thought it was a pity they didn't show more of Caleb's reaction though. I guess this is kind of AU, as he wasn't as affected in the film. This is also pretty sad, fyi.

Please please please review, I'll love you a lot!

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The trick to life, Caleb has figured out, is logic. Since he was a child, he watched his parents give everything they had to those with less. They prized morality over everything, and where had it got them?

Dead. Riddled full of bullets.

Tris, her issue is emotion. Everything is so complicated with Tris; a tangled mess of love and anger, pride and fear and that foolishly enduring hope that turned her into a fireball before she was even seventeen.

Caleb stands back. Caleb observes. In a way, he almost considers himself Divergent – he's able to see the bigger picture, all sides, with cool, detached reason as his god. Yes: Erudite is the true Divergent, so to speak. That's what made them most suitable to rule.

Divergents themselves, on the other hand…

He can barely believe it's his sister hanging up there in the glass cage. It looks positively monstrous, twisting and writhing among the wires (although Caleb knows, logical individual that he is, that the fear of monsters is nothing more than silly folklore). He recalls how Tris grunted and snarled as she smashed her fists into that man's face on the train. It had been awful. Caleb has never been so scared – starting a fight on a moving train, it was absurd. He can't believe there's a shred of Erudite in either Tris or Four after they lunged like that. What possible payoff could be worth that unimaginable danger? And the risk to him, who wanted to avoid confrontation in the first place? How can they possibly be Abnegation?

No, Caleb isn't sure about Divergents. But that was okay: being Erudite doesn't mean having all the answers, only the capability to process them.

"Vitals are fluctuating, ma'am," Peter reports from his station. Tris is currently wired into the Amity simulation, and she's having trouble. Caleb isn't the least bit surprised. Tris has always been thoughtlessly callous. If there's one sim he'd bet on her failing, it's this one.

Jeanine waves a hand dismissively. "That happened last time. Just keep her in there. She's the one, I know it."

Jeanine's eyes are glittering. Caleb should be pleased, he supposes, that his little sister is so useful in this way. But he can't help but feel a twinge of jealousy hearing them refer to Tris as "the chosen one" for doing nothing but displaying her own weakness and handing herself in, while he's had to work his way up to this position in Erudite, overcoming the stigma of being a Prior as he did.

But that feeling is inconsequential, in the grand scheme of things. Caleb is still learning to overcome his multitude of feelings for his family. He officially shed the connectionwhen he stripped off those abysmal Abnegation clothes for the last time, and the homesickness tugged at him less each time he laid down in his blue-covered bed, a smile on his face from joking with his co-workers.

Faction before blood, after all.

In the simulation, Tris cries out. Her head thrashes to one side, wires pulling taut against convulsing limbs. Her chest heaves with huge, trembling breaths, and Caleb wonders vaguely what she's seeing right now.

"She thinks she's falling," Peter reveals. Unnecessarily. Peter is Dauntless, though; he wouldn't understand the intricacies of Caleb needing to compartmentalize his gut reaction to _Tris is pain_ , for the importance of the mission.

He'll have words with Jeanine about Peter's "promotion" after this is over. It isn't appropriate for a grunt like him to be this close to the heart of Erudite…

That line of thought is jolted from his mind, however, when Tris _screams_ _._ It's not a little shriek but a raw, drawn-out noise of _fear_ that cuts through the testing room like a blade.

 _We scream from a different part of the lungs in life-and-death situations._ Caleb read it in a book somewhere. The words drift back involuntarily. _The screaming mechanism is evolutionarily designed to shock predators, but in extreme circumstances the scream may also serve as a last effort cry for help._

 _Usually to the mother._

Caleb's throat is uncomfortably tight. The tension in the lab hasn't escaped him: it's brimming in the air, in the exchanged glances of the observers at their stations. The array of flashing red on the screens behind them forms a grim backdrop.

" _Don't_ pull her out," Janine orders through gritted teeth. "Not yet."

But beyond her line of sight, a pair of guards are edging towards the door. One checks his watch nonchalantly. _Almost over now_ , says the set of his shoulders, the stance of his feet.

 _Presumptuous_ , Caleb decides, anger flaring through him. Presumptuous and _ignorant_. All the evidence points towards Tris passing this sim with flying colors, just as she'd passed the other four. She's 100% Divergent – there's no room for anything other than success in those statistics.

He folds his arms decisively, drawing himself up to his full height beside Jeanine, but it doesn't stop his stomach from squirming when he sees the tears that have started to leak from Tris' eyes, behind the glass. Caleb can see her tumbling now, free falling through the non-existent air. He can't hear the words she mumbled, feverish, but he saw her lips form the same word over and over again.

 _Mom. Mom. Mom._

Caleb's stomach drops to somewhere around his ankles. The urge to flee the room hits him, incredibly strong, to take those tantalising few steps over to the door and just _leave_. Get out of here. But how could he do that, when he can't even wrench his eyes away from Tris? Suddenly he's watching her every move, eyes taking in every twist and turn and - what was that lurch? His heart skips a beat. Did she hit something in mid-air?

It's difficult to tell, but anxiety gnaws away at him. He finds himself flashing back to that fateful day, he one that's blurred into one long line of grief and bloodshed. He's tried to push it as far out of his mind as possible, but now it materialises around him again: breaking into Dauntless, and how it had felt to fall. Air shrieking in his ears. Expecting blinding pain to come at any moment...

He knows what's going to happen a split second before it does, on nothing but instinct. His eyes shoot wide open, a shout ready on his tongue, but too late.

Too late.

Tris snaps.

There's no other word for it.

She hits the imaginary ground with a shockwave that barrels through the testing room, hitting Caleb like a physical punch in the gut. He stumbles back, mind blanking. The guards, the scientists, Jeanine, Peter, all fall away. All he can see is Tris, dangling from the wires.

Blood seeping from her nose.

Swinging slightly, side to side.

Dead.

The screens around him flatlines into a single shrill beep, making it official.

And it _hurts_. Fuck. Caleb sucks in breath at the sudden pain in his chest. A horrible, awful ache. His eyelids flutter and he sees - sees –

Oh, God. He sees _Beatrice._

Seven-year-old Beatrice, shrieking with laughter as he tickled her. Ten-year-old Beatrice, pulling a face as he dabbed at he scraped knees from jumping off of the roof again. Twelve-year-old Beatrice, holding out food for a factionless girl, even though she never quite understood why.

Beatrice, Beatrice, Beatrice. Bravery and fear shining out of her at once.

Arms wrapped tight around him and soft murmurs in his ear, making the tension in his body unwind, the first time he woke shaking from seeing his parents' corpses rotting in his dreams.

Caleb feels violently, violently sick. Distantly, he registers Jeanine yelling at the operators, trying to force life back into her lifeless body, and hope swells inside of him briefly. Is it possible? They have so much technology here, and it's only been moments...

But moments turn into minutes, and soon enough the screens are being shut down with sighs of disappointment. _No_ , he wants to scream. _No, no, no, bring her back, bring her back._ She's only seventeen, for God's sake, only a _child_. There are so many things she still has to do. She can't be gone, it just isn't possible.

... And yet, it is. Hadn't he considered it? Hadn't he included it in amongst his calculations, when he weighed the risks against the benefits of betraying his sister?

And hadn't Tris dying been one of them? Hadn't he thought about this, and decided it would be worth it - for the greater good?

Caleb can't be in that room any longer. He's in the corridor before he knows he's moving, stumbling down the hallway, barely making it into a cubicle before he's throwing up. When there's nothing left in his stomach he can't bring himself to move, shaking pathetically.

His sister is dead because of him.

No - Tris is dead because of him. Tris who was brave, and selfless, and above everything _good_. Tris who wanted to make the world better - freer, happier - is probably being taken away by the guards to be dumped in the garbage.

And Caleb's traitorous Erudite brain knows exactly how it happened. The pressure on her heart was too much, building until it shuddered to a stop, cutting off the blood flow to the brain cells. They tried to hold onto life for as long as they could, but eventually they gave up too, and the power was cut with a single blow.

Caleb's Erudite brain doesn't believe that her spirit is still out there somewhere. She's gone, just like his parents. Whatever brief flash of chemical reactions made them alive is over, and will never, ever be back.

He doesn't realise he's crying until the damp seeps through his shirt and into his shoulder. Out of nowhere he's hit by the ache for arms around him; his mother's soothing touch or his father's wise words of advice. Beatrice's smile through the darkest of times, and her lovely, empty promise that everything was going to be okay. There was no logical reason for those words to comfort him, yet they did. Always.

He wants it all and deserves none of it.

And he'll have none of it, because he killed them. He had a thousand opportunities to stop the storm on Abnegation and he didn't. And he actively betrayed Tris.

He killed his family.

Logically, Caleb knows that he could survive by himself for the rest of his life and live many, many years to come.

Curled up on the floor of the bathroom, Caleb has never felt more alone in his life. And nothing he can do will ever bring them back.


End file.
